US winter crisis switches to water

POWER has been restored for many of the millions of Texans who were without electricity for days after a deadly winter blast overwhelmed the grid.

However, the crisis is far from over in parts of the south, with many people lacking safe drinking water.

More than 190,000 homes and businesses remained without power in Texas, according to poweroutage.us early yesterday, down from about three million two days earlier, although utility officials said limited rolling blackouts were still possible.

The storms also left more than 330,000 from Virginia to Louisiana without power and about 71,000 in Oregon were enduring a week-long outage following a massive ice and snow storm.

The snow and ice moved into the Appalachians, northern Maryland and southern Pennsylvania, and later the north east, as the extreme weather was blamed for the deaths of at least 58 people, including a Tennessee farmer trying to save two calves that apparently wandered into frozen water, and a 17-year-old Oklahoma girl who fell into a frozen pond.

A growing number of people have died trying to keep warm. In and around the western Texas city of Abilene, authorities said six people had died of the cold.